Johnny. Please don’t say those things to your mother; you’re too clever, you know too much. We’re family, that’s all that counts. Let’s love each other and forget. Loving, more than anything, means letting people do the things they have to do. Johnny, you live in Paris because that’s what you have to do. Mother here has to do some things too; so do I. It’s the way it is. Please don’t fight; it kills me hearing you talk this way.’
Then he starts crying hard and Mother breaks into sobs. I’m crying, too. Now we’re the Burghers of Calais standing in our own rain. Maybe it’s time to break the huddle, call the signals and snap the ball. These kinds of stupid thoughts are tramping through my mind. Real emotion is tough for me to handle; I’ve got about twenty lines of defense to keep from feeling.
Finally we sit again. Dad sighs and begins talking. I can’t get my mind around it; who the hell is this guy?
‘There are some things maybe you don’t know, Johnny. When I met Bess she was only fifteen. She was just recovering from a bad nervous breakdown. She could never even go back to school again. I was eighteen and working at Hog Island as a carpenter. I wasn’t happy; in fact, I was miserable. I didn’t like living in the city and I was missing the farm. I felt everybody could see I was only a farm boy and was laughing at me.
‘It was a big change, John. You know, winter and summer, none of us kids wore shoes regularly on the farm. We walked to school with shoes tied around our necks and put them on when we went inside. I never owned a pair of shoes till we got to Philadelphia. I’d get Orin’s. Those shoes never wore out; we only put them on for school and church.
‘You can’t know what a change it was coming from Wisconsin where I knew maybe twenty people all together and half of them were my brothers and sisters. There I was in Philadelphia, talking funny with a farm-boy Wisconsin hick accent; I was afraid to open my mouth. I’d be jammed in trolley cars with people who didn’t know anything about me and didn’t care. Everybody seemed to know what to do and where they were going. People would bump into me because I couldn’t even get out of the way. I didn’t know how to flush a toilet, use a telephone or dance.
‘I met Mother on a rainy day in a doorway near John Wanamaker’s. She came into the doorway crying her eyes out. She was crying because she’d borrowed her older sister Maggie’s fancy hat without asking and now it was getting ruined in the rain.
‘I had a big old-time umbrella my mother made me carry and I opened it over her. Gosh, I guess if Mom hadn’t made me carry that umbrella I’d never even’ve gotten to know you, Bess, think of that.
‘Well, Bess was pretty, and scared. She was the scaredest person I’d ever met. It wasn’t just the hat; she was scared about the thunder and lightning, she was scared the trolley wasn’t going to come; she was scared about what time it was, and she was scared of me. Something inside me wanted to help her not be so scared.
‘And, Johnny, Mother’s always been that way. Sometimes she acts strong and likes to be bossy, but inside she’s scared. It’s something you’ve got to remember.
‘That day she finally let me go along with her in the trolley, and when she got out I followed her, keeping my umbrella over the hat. She led me to a big stone house and said this was where she lived, and goodbye. I stood across the street waiting to see her safe inside but two big dogs came barking at the door. She ran away and down the street in the rain; it wasn’t where she lived at all.
‘That’s the kind of thing she does, Johnny, because she’s so scared. I chased her, laughing, but she was mad and I thought she might be crazy but I loved her already.’
I look at Mom. Her eyes are blank, her face a mask; she’s stunned.
‘And you’re not much different, Johnny. You were the scrawniest baby I’ve ever seen in my life. For the first three months you cried without stopping. It’s a wonder that didn’t drive your poor mother absolutely crazy. Then, you grew up to be the scaredy-cattest kid in the neighborhood. I used to think sometimes you caught it from your mother.
‘You were afraid of the dark. You were afraid of loud noises; you used to hold your fingers in your ears at baseball games and you’d stuff cotton in them on the Fourth of July. You were afraid to ride a bike, to roller-skate, even to swim. I don’t think you learned swimming till you were over thirteen years old.
‘And you were afraid of all the other kids on the block. You’d come running home with some little kid half your size chasing you. That’s how you learned to run, running away from everybody.
‘I was sure you’d never learn to take care of yourself; that you’d live with us all your life. I remember being so embarrassed because you were one of the world’s worst baseball players.
‘And you grew so fast, early. For a while, when you were about ten or twelve, you were a head taller than anybody in your class. This made it worse. Little kids would take turns beating up on you so they could say they licked the big sissy down the block. Summers, you spent your time hiding in the cellar, on the porch reading or later fooling around with your birds. Sometimes I look at you now and I can’t believe it’s the same person.
‘What I want to say is, you’re a lot like your mother, John. You’re fighting all the time but in your own way. Maybe that’s why you live in France instead of America. You don’t want to compete, you want to stay apart.
‘But, in another way, you’re different from Bess. You get that part from me. There’s something in me that’s wild, wild like a wild animal. It was in my father, it’s in my brothers and two of my sisters; we aren’t quite human, quite civilized. There’s some animal quality and it can come out anytime. I’m surprised we’ve gotten as far as we have without having a murderer in the family.
‘I don’t know what brings it on; could be all those years living in the woods, or it could be the Indian blood.
‘You know, Johnny, your great-grandfather was a trapper. He never lived in a house from the time he was thirteen; he married a full-blooded Oneida Indian. Your great-grandmother, my father’s mother, was over six feet tall. She was stronger than any man, and could talk only Indian and French.
‘I never heard her speak one word. That grandfather and grandmother of mine lived practically like prehistoric people. They didn’t homestead and settle till my dad was seven years old. They lived with the Indians and had no real religion; so far as I know they never got married – at least, not in a church.
‘Dad used to tell stories about how they’d drift along, tending the traps, buying furs, caching, then packing them all out in canoes. They were animals, Johnny, and it’s still there. It’s in me, it’s in you, too, and we always have to fight it.’
Mother’s nodding her head now; this is something she can live with. Jack the Ripper, North American version of Tarzan the apeman.
‘One reason I married Bess was she liked beautiful things. She’d always lived in cities and all her family’d lived in cities as far back as anybody could remember. She likes nice furniture, she keeps a clean house and we live like decent human beings.
‘You can see I’m not like my brothers or even my father; I’m civilized. I don’t drink much and I don’t run around. My brothers are all dangerous men, except Ed. Ed was lucky like me and married a good woman. Aunt Mary trained him just fine. You could never predict my father or my brothers; never tell what they were thinking or what they were going to do. None of them ever held full-time jobs in their lives. Pete and Orin and Caleb were always drinking or running back into the woods to hunt. Winters they’d curl up and hibernate like bears.
‘Now, my mom did a good job with Dad. At least she got him into church and he took care of us kids. But he didn’t dress like a normal person or do things like other people. You know, Johnny, he never paid a dime to Social Security or paid any income tax in his life? He lived on the outside of everything. He lived down there in southwest Philadelphia as if he was living on a farm or in the woods. All those buildings, cars and everything didn’t mean a thing to him.
‘I didn’t want